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Two Deaths of Two Men Who Knew Too Much

It’s not over exaggerating when most Americans have questioned, “How many more until mainstream media NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN decides to expose all this evil linked to a former President and his dangerous egregious co-conspirators and administration.

Elise Jordan, the wife of journalist Michael Hastings, confirmed her husband had been working on a story involving CIA Director John Brennan. The email posted on Wikileaks, says that then Obama’s counter terrorism czar Brennan was in charge of spying on journalists. Who would know what and who was dying to break the next breaking news that could possibly ruin the reputation of a future President possibly leading to his impeachment.

But Michael is dead. He was demonstratively scared and extremely concerned for his safety days before his death. He had reason and he was a human being, a life, a great journalist. He was driving his new Mercedes in Los Angeles and before his car crashed next to a Palm tree there were three explosives that went off captured on the video seconds before Michael died. Michael feared his Mercedes had been tampered with and it had.

The big question, why was the engine of the Mercedes 100 feet away from the tree he supposedly hit and not with a hard impact. It was the bombs that did the damage. The questions surrounding Michael’s homicide are confirmed in the surveillance camera footage of the crash. The video shows three explosions before the Mercedes came to a stop. Witnesses described three explosions comparing the sound to bomb blasts. Many automotive experts have pondered why the Mercedes violently exploded into flames.

This is not the first controversy for John Brennan. An intelligence operative who altered Obama’s passport records turned FBI informant on boss John Brennan. Then turned up murdered as well in Washington, D.C.

During the 2008 run up to the election, it was announced that candidate Obama’s passport information had been breached. It was later discovered that the breach was an employee of Brennan’s, while Brennan was working for then candidate Obama. In March, 2008, the State Department launched an investigation of the breached passport records of Barack Obama and days later those of Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

The investigation centered on one employee, a contract worker for a company that was headed by Brennan; The Analysis Corporation. The firm was cited in March, 2008 for penetrating the files of Presidential candidate Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the State Department’s passport office.

At the time of the breach, Brennan was working as an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. After the breach was revealed by the Washington Times, Brennan’s company said in a statement sent to reporters, “This individual’s actions were taken without the knowledge or direction of anyone at the Analysis Corporation and are wholly inconsistent with our professional and ethical standards.”

As life proceeded, Brennan started as Obama’s campaign adviser then became assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and eventually CIA Director. It was never explained why Brennan wanted to get into candidate Obama’s files but obviously this came from Obama who authorized Brennan to do this.

A month after the passport breach the key witness in this case was murdered. The witness was Lt. Quarles Harris Jr. He was shot in the head in his car in front of his church. Harris was cooperating with federal authorities at the time of his death. The investigation DIED with him as does so many who come too close to the evil truth. There’s no other way of putting it.

But before he was murdered, Lt. Harris told federal investigators that he received passport information from a co-conspirator who works for the U.S. Department of State. Who was the co-conspirator? Why weren’t they brought to trial along with Brennan and everyone else involved?

It was Brennan’s company who accessed and altered Obama’s passport before the 2008 Presidential election while Brennan was working on Obama’s campaign team. Could it be that Brennan and the intelligence officers were trying to remove a destination from all three passports, covering up for Obama, Hillary and McCain in an illegal plot. Was this destination a Muslim country like Saudi Arabia or another like Russia? And then the answer came.

Brennan spent 25 years working for the CIA prior to the security breach. Mr. Brennan was an analyst at the CIA but during the 1990s served a tour as the Chief of Station in Saudi Arabia. From 1999 to early 2001, in this case, he might have known what was going down on 9/11, when Special Counsel Robert Mueller had arranged for two Saudis’ who knew the 9/11 terrorists to escape Sarasota, Florida two weeks before 9/11. Brennan was Chief of Staff to George J. Tenet, then the Director of the CIA. At the end of Brennan’s service, in 2004 and 2005, he set up what is now the counter-terrorism center.

It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to conclude this was for the sole purpose of eliminating the records of information that would jeopardize Obama’s candidacy for President. What a way to start this Presidency. Many who knew this very private information were thinking, “Well, what else is to come?” Oh, they did not know and neither did we as Americans.

On April 8, 2008, after the breach became public, Obama confessed to having taken a trip to Pakistan in 1981! Really? A trip to Pakistan? The then candidate said, “I traveled to Pakistan when I was in college.” WHY?

Jake Tapper, who later became a board member at the Clinton Foundation, was surprised and said, “This last part of a college trip to Pakistan was news to many of us who have been following the race closely. And it was odd that we hadn’t heard about it before, given all the talk of Pakistan during this campaign.” Or did Obama lie and travel to Saudi Arabia or Iran? I suppose we’ll remain questioning what was Barack Obama hiding this time, before he even became President. The death of Michael Hastings added to Lt. Quarles Harris. Dead men tell no lies and the truth shall remain forever with them.

At the end of his life, Michael Hastings, like many of the progressive journalists he counted among his friends, he felt besieged by an overreaching government. Hastings was living in Los Angeles. At a Beverly Hills theater in April 2013, he took part in a panel discussion about the documentary War on Whistleblowers: Free Press and the National Security State. He interviewed in May 2013, on The Young Turks, a talk show on Current TV.

Hastings railed against the Obama administration, which “has clearly declared war on the press”; the only recourse, he said, was for the press to respond: “We declare war on you.” On May 31, he dashed off an urgent tweet: “first they came for Manning. Then Assange. Then Fox. Then the ap.drake and the other whistle-blowers. Any NYT reporters too.”

He attended screenings of his friend Jeremy Scahill’s film Dirty Wars, which seeks to expose “the hidden truth behind America’s expanding covert wars,” and when leaks about the National Security Agency began appearing in The Guardian. Then Edward Snowden was charged with espionage, Hastings was deeply troubled by the revelations and the Justice Department’s response. On June 7, 2013, his last post for BuzzFeed, where he was a staff writer, focused on “Why Democrats Love to Spy on Americans,” and at the time of his death. A pretty telling story just based on the title. If only Hastings was here, still alive to validate his suspicions. He was right the Deep State corruption was illegally involved in obtaining FISA warrants to wiretap and unmask an incoming President and over 30,000 American civilians without knowledge and consent. Hastings had been working on a profile of CIA director John Brennan for Rolling Stone.

It was for Rolling Stone, where Hastings had a contract, that he’d written “The Runaway General,” the 2010 article that resulted in the cashiering of General Stanley McChrystal, America’s commander in Afghanistan, and made his name as a journalist. Mark Leibovich, in this summer’s inside-the-­Beltway big read, This Town, describes Hastings’s McChrystal piece as “the most consequential” journalism of 2010 and possibly Obama’s entire first term. But despite going after big game, Hastings tended to be nonchalant about possible repercussions. “Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people,” he said once, “one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me.”

By the middle of June, though, Hastings, then 33, had become openly afraid. Helicopters are a common sight in the Hollywood Hills, but he had told Jordanna Thigpen, a neighbor he’d become close to, that there were more of them in the sky than usual, and he was certain they were tracking him. On Saturday the 15th, he called Matt Farwell, his writing partner, and said Farwell might be interviewed by the FBI. Farwell was unsettled. “He was being really cagey over the phone, which was odd, very odd,” Farwell says. On the 17th, Hastings e-mailed colleagues at BuzzFeed to warn them that “the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates’ ”; he was “onto a big story” and needed to go “off the rada[r] for a bit … hope to see you all soon.”

“He was deeply agitated,” says The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur. Since Hastings didn’t want to say anything more over e-mail or the phone, Farwell, who lived in Virginia, set up a lunch for him the following Thursday with a trusted friend of Farwell’s, also in L.A., so that she could pass along whatever Hastings had to tell him on her forthcoming trip East.

The lunch never happened. At 4:20 a.m. on Tuesday, June 18, Hastings’s silver Mercedes C250 coupe, speeding south on Highland Avenue, crossed Melrose, jumped the median, hit a palm tree, and exploded. The charred body of the driver was identified by the Los Angeles coroner as John Doe 117 until fingerprints confirmed that the deceased was Michael Hastings.

Sergeant Joe Biggs, who met Hastings in 2008, when the reporter, on assignment for GQ, was embedded with his unit in Afghanistan, hadn’t spoken to his friend in three months, but Hastings had BCC’d him on the June 17 e-mail to BuzzFeed colleagues. “I tried calling him when I got that e-mail,” Biggs says, “ ’cause I felt so fucking scared, because it didn’t seem like him.” Biggs e-mailed BuzzFeed, too. “They weren’t helpful at all. I kept e-mailing back, ‘What should we do? I’m not a journalist. I don’t know how to go about this stuff.’ They never responded to me.” Biggs tried contacting other media to let them know about the ominous e-mail; the only person who got back to him was a local L.A. reporter. “If that thing didn’t get released,” Biggs told me when I first called him, two weeks after Hastings’s death, “people would keep thinking it was an accident.”

Hastings lived as he died. On the small side, with blue eyes and scruffy good looks that suggested Jude Law’s little brother, he did everything fast: chain-smoking Parliament Lights, calling and e-mailing people late at night, speaking in a jittery torrent, churning out copy. (The first, long draft of his McChrystal article was a 48-hour production.) “The dude was exhausting,” Farwell says. “He just kind of vibrated energy. He had a deep well of moral outrage and sadness that I think goes back to a lot of the hypocrisy he saw and felt.”